About

Likes: installation art, sea glass, meteorites, Levantine food, dogs, purple, gardens, chant, textile crafts, 18°C/40% RH, long walks, lemonade. rare books, layered datasets, performance herding, fruit, museums, pelicans, translating, efficiency, inclusivity, pluralism, purpose, dust devils, yoga, raves, The X-Files, blackcurrant candy, competent risk mitigation, documentary photography, portraiture, adapted domestic architecture, bristlecone pines…

Dislikes: conversations about gear, meetings/parties with no thesis, crowds, revving engines, audience members who sing along during a concert, being scolded, audio presenters who pretend to have just been laughing when they’re introducing a story about Kink Kamp or hosting the Sunday Puzzle, audio producers who don’t mute interview subjects’ wet mouth sounds (that’s you, Fresh Air),  fluorescent lighting, “relaxing” massage, sentimentalism, violent sports, neighbours, riding in cars, croton, roadkill, stockyards…

Best Compliment Ever Received on my Writing: I was (briefly) the junior classical music critic for my local alt.weekly paper (specializing in new/experimental music). I covered… some oratorio? I don’t remember. But one of the soloists was wearing the most poorly fitted tuxedo trousers I’d ever seen. I couldn’t pay attention to the performance almost at all because I couldn’t stop marveling at the lumpy, baggy, too tight, weirdly bunched trousers. The next day, I was talking about it before choir rehearsal and one of the tenors piped up to tell me that he was the one who had rented the soloist those pants from the tuxedo shop where he worked. He explained how the poor guy had had his luggage lost when he flew in and those awful trousers were the best my fellow chorister could find for him in the whole rental store. Anyway, so I wrote up my review as much about the trousers as about the music, since I had an inside source and all. None of this is the compliment. The compliment came about six months later when I was out to dinner with a friend and two baritones from her choir (look, the local community of classical singers is pretty insular) who I didn’t know. They found out I was a music critic and they spontaneously raved about this hilarious review they’d read awhile back that was all about a guy’s terrible trousers and hardly at all about his singing. I told them, in fact, I was the one who’d written that review and they whooped in delight and ordered another round of mac ‘n cheese in celebration.

Second Best Compliment Ever Received on my Writing: I took an advanced, for-credit, Iyengar course through the kinesiology department that acquiesced to the policy for writing as a part of every 100-200 level course. In fact, I took it six times because I so admired the teacher and it was “free” via tuition remission benefit. The first time I took it, the assignment was to “discuss three elements of yoga that most benefit you as a college student”. Indeed, every other student enrolled was approximately 20 years old. When our papers were handed back, my teacher said, “this is the best thing about yoga I’ve ever read”.

Miscellaneous

    • I’m a “third-culture kid”, a child expat. I grew up half in the USA and half overseas.
    • In third grade, our class play was about how Santa was struggling to get all his gift-delivery handled so Mrs. Claus stepped in and overhauled the whole system and made everything “efficient”. I starred as Mrs. Claus; I was a method actor.
    • One of my classmates was killed in Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. We looked alike.
    • I was offered a full scholarship to Bennington to study poetry and I turned it down because reasons (including that I’m an idiot).
    • I worked in library special collections and museums in my first career. I loved it. I miss it.
    • I once lived in a rebuilt 17th c. stone barn with no plumbing or electricity but that was filled with dozens of broken pianos and 400 guitars.
    • I have a now expired beekeeping qualification.
    • My first professional singing gig was as a Patsy Cline impersonator.
    • Dave Matthews used to tell me I made the best biscuits he’d ever eaten.
Guinness
Guinness
  • About 60% of who I am as a teacher comes from the methods of my 7th grade British history teacher, David Sox, and my MA guru, Alan Howard. I’m incredibly grateful.
  • I’ve permanently lost (to aphasia) the word for my favorite flower (I do remember that it’s Victorian, purple, ruffled, and smells like vanilla although it has a reputation for smelling like cherry pie).
  • The first time I went to Vegas was for a job interview and the marquee on one of the casinos advertised “BJ $3”. Now that I live here, I know that meant “blackjack”.
  • The scary old lady down the road offered five-year-old me M&Ms but they turned out to be Reese’s Pieces. I was so traumatized by the discovery, for three decades I thought I didn’t like chocolate combined with peanut butter. I’m still suspicious.
  • I’ve renovated several historical houses.
  • My dog and I got trained as a therapy dog team. We do “Reading with Rover”, where we hang out with little kids who are struggling to read. I’ve learned a lot about how to be a good teacher from watching my sweet dog.

Professional Info: My title is Professor. I’m in the English Department. I work for the second largest community college in the country. I teach writing (first-year composition, creative writing) and humanities (ancient-early modern world culture, and special topics like Vegas Studies, retellings of the Odyssey, and longform journalism). I’ve recently moved on from acting as WPA for a 7500 students/year program. I’m a section editor for Kairos, where I co-produce KCast. I write technology-mediated poetry and some other stuff. I began using and theorizing soundwriting out of desperation as a graduate teaching assistant who lost the ability to read visually after a brain injury but who also desperately needed to maintain her health insurance and so had to keep teaching writing. Ten years later, the book I co-edited, Soundwriting Pedagogies, is recently published and a second book, Amplifying Soundwriting, is in process. I might like to finish grad school, yes, let me know if you can help. Ask me about my Humanities Lab assignment and what happens when accessibility is the second highest criterion in designing a curriculum.